BG Reads 1.31.2025

🟪 BG Reads - January 31, 2025

January 31, 2025

Bingham Group Reads

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January 31, 2025

➡️ Today's BG Reads include:

🟪 Austin City Council sets new committee assignments for 2025 (Community Impact)

🟪 Council OKs study, contracts for wildfire study and vegetation management (Austin Monitor)

🟪 Trump's cost-cutting could curtail federal office footprint in Austin (Austin

Business Journal)

🟪 Abbott expected to promote vouchers and other highlights of his 2025 agenda in Sunday speech (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Trump is getting the lower interest rates he demanded from everyone but the Fed (Reuters)

Read On!

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🏛️ City Memos:

ℹ️ Helpful City Links:

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

➡️ Austin City Council sets new committee assignments for 2025 (Community Impact)

With a new City Council term underway and several new faces on the council dais, Austin officials have updated their assignments for committees working on several priority topics.

Austin's council committees can hear public feedback, receive staff briefings, review information and propose policies in specific subject areas. Committees are typically filled by up to five council members, who can serve on multiple.

In those smaller groups, officials have occasionally forwarded policy proposals to the full council dais. Some members also signaled they hope the bodies can take more time to vet important items and allow for closer community review before making it to a final vote… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Council OKs study, contracts for wildfire study and vegetation management (Austin Monitor)

Despite pleas from about two dozen people to reject the two items, City Council voted unanimously on Thursday to authorize an agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station to conduct a study of wildland fire fuels on properties managed by the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve. The agreement relates to an update to a study done by Baylor University in 2009 on those properties. Council allocated up to $198,467 for the project for a term of three years. Council also authorized contracts with four companies “for vegetation management for wildfire mitigation.” Although the agenda indicates that the total contracts will not exceed $7.5 million, only $200,000 is available in the Parks and Recreation Department’s operating budget. “Funding for the remaining contract term is contingent upon available funding in future budgets,” according to the agenda. The prescribed burns done by these contractors are far more controversial than the study… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Trump's cost-cutting could curtail federal office footprint in Austin (Austin

Business Journal)

As the Trump administration looks to cut federal spending, one potential option of reducing its office footprint could impact Austin's office market. The General Services Administration, which oversees the federal government's roughly 360 million-square-foot portfolio, could be a target of the cost-reduction efforts led by President Donald Trump's newly formed Department of Government Efficiency.

The federal government currently leases 149.39 million square feet of office space across the nation, with rent payments totaling $5.23 billion annually, according to a recent analysis by commercial real estate data firm Trepp. In total, the GSA owns and leases more than 363 million square feet of space in 8,397 buildings nationally, according to the agency.

From the Capital of Texas Plaza to the South Tech Business Center and Lavaca Plaza, the GSA leases more than 913,800 square feet in the Austin metro, with some leases expiring as early as Jan. 31, according to the data. That's more than the size of any office tower in downtown Austin, according to ABJ list research.

The leases set to expire Jan. 31 are for roughly 42,500 square feet at 2101 E. St. Elmo Road, 38,900 square feet at 2191 Woodward St. and 8,800 square feet at 825 E. Rundberg Lane, according to the filing. The GSA also leases an unknown square footage at 220 E. Eighth St. in downtown Austin, which will expire in May, and over 20,000 square feet at 9009 Mountain Ridge Drive that will expire in August… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Texas Rep. Doggett: Austin airport missing half of necessary air traffic controllers (KXAN)

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said the number of air traffic controllers currently staffed at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) is only about half of what the Federal Aviation Administration said is necessary to increase the margin of safety for passengers leaving and entering Texas’ capital.

“Everyone who flies in and out of our airport is at risk if we can’t increase the margin of safety,” Doggett said. His statements come less than a day after a tragic mid-air collision between an American Airlines commercial plane and a military helicopter at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Washington D.C. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the deadly crash and have not determined the cause… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Austin leaders aim to fund homelessness system investments, add thousands of housing units (Community Impact)

Austin officials and other local leaders are seeking to fund up to hundreds of millions of dollars in new homeless services over the next decade, based on recent proposals to scale up the region's homelessness response system.

Recommendations for extensive new investments were made by the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, or ECHO, in a report from the nonprofit last summer. That review also showed the amount of people seeking homeless services around Austin continued to rise through the early 2020s, including a jump in clients experiencing homelessness for the first time.

Members of City Council's Public Health Committee in late 2024 recommended finding new, sustainable ways to fund the proposed housing and service additions based on ECHO's findings, and the full council voted to back that process Jan. 30... 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

➡️ Abbott expected to promote vouchers and other highlights of his 2025 agenda in Sunday speech (Texas Tribune)

Gov. Greg Abbott will lay out his legislative priorities Sunday night during his biennial State of the State address giving lawmakers marching orders on what topics he wants them to fast-track this session.

Two years ago, Abbott was able to push through bills to reduce the property taxes of millions of Texans after promising the “largest property tax cuts in state history” during his 2022 reelection campaign. But he was foiled in perhaps his biggest priority: passing a school voucher-like program that would allow the use of public dollars to go toward private education.

Passing that legislation, which the governor’s office refers to as “school choice” or education savings accounts, will likely be among Abbott’s top priorities this session, following his heavy involvement in last year’s Republican primaries in which he campaigned against House GOP lawmakers who opposed his proposal.

Eleven of those Republicans were replaced by new lawmakers who said they support Abbott’s plans for passing a school voucher program. The governor said in November that the elections had left him with a net of 79 “hardcore” voucher supporters in the House — more than the simple majority of 76 needed to pass a bill… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Texas under consideration for more Stargate projects, prompting hopes of AI rush (Houston Chronicle)

For months Texas developers have been watching bulldozers move back and forth across a sprawling industrial site north of Abilene, building a data center complex large enough to cover almost 70 football fields.

The tenant was kept a secret until last week, when President Donald Trump announced that tech giants Open AI and Oracle, along with the Japanese investment firm Soft Bank, were leading a consortium of technology companies to build Stargate, a $500 billion artificial intelligence network, with the Texas site to be their first project. And there could be more to come for Texas, with Open AI executives flying to Austin late last week to meet with staffers for Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, along with state Sen. Tan Parker, a north Texas Republican.

“Our discussions focused on how Texas — renowned for its go-big ethos — can become the powerhouse of the AI revolution much like Michigan was for the auto industry in the early 20th Century,” Chris Lehane, chief global affairs officer at Open AI, wrote on LinkedIn. “What was clear right off the bat, as I sat under an epic painting of the Alamo: These folks play to win!” What degree of the Stargate project will be built within Texas remains to be seen.

A spokesman for Open AI said this week the company was looking at a number of sites in Texas but declined to discuss details, saying only that the state’s business friendly environment, workforce and supply chains were part of their calculation in focusing on Texas. In the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, already one of the country’s largest hubs for data centers, developers have been rushing to figure out how they can get a piece of the Stargate project.

“How did Abilene end up wrangling this? That’s what everyone wants to know,” said Paul Bendel, president of Tech Titans, a trade group representing data centers in North Texas. “It’s a great community. Plenty of space and good energy resources. And we’re trying to figure out what other parts of the state might be able to land a facility like this.”… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

➡️ Trump is getting the lower interest rates he demanded from everyone but the Fed (Reuters)

U.S. President Donald Trump is getting his wish that interest rates drop across the world, just not at home where a strong economy and uncertainty over his own policies have set the stage for the Federal Reserve to diverge from its central bank peers.

The European Central Bank cut rates on Thursday, the Bank of Canada did as well on Wednesday, and the Bank of England is likely to do so next week – steps that, with the Fed in a holding pattern on rates, could strengthen the value of the dollar and further complicate Trump's trade goals by making imports cheaper and U.S. exports more expensive… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

➡️ Trump, facing two crises in his second week, spreads the blame around (Wall Street Journal)

President Trump’s handling of two crises this week—one, a bureaucratic mess and the other, a horrific tragedy—quickly shifted the White House from inaugural euphoria to the realities of governing. His defiant stand in the face of nationwide confusion and fear left some aides scrambling to fortify the image of a White House that could do no wrong. But he handled both problems with the same approach: deflecting blame and attacking Democrats, the media and his predecessors.

His message was an amplified version of what he has tried to exude since taking office: He is in charge. The country also received its first live-action glimpse of a White House and cabinet that is being hastily assembled and crafting policies on the fly that in one case had to be quickly reversed. On Monday, a memo written by an acting director of the White House’s budget office caused a widespread panic and might have inadvertently led the Medicaid system to freeze in less than 24 hours.

On Thursday, Trump’s new Defense and Transportation chiefs were thrust in the middle of investigating the worst domestic airplane crash in two decades. “It’s not your fault, and I know you agree with me very strongly on intellect and even psychological well-being of the air-traffic controller,” Trump said as he introduced Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

It was there, at the press briefing, when Trump announced the appointment of a new acting Federal Aviation Administration director, less than 24 hours after an American Airlines plane collided with an Army helicopter over the Potomac River, killing 67 people. It was also there that he speculated the accident could have been caused because of “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies stretching back to the Obama administration.

When asked to explain what he was basing this on, he said “because I have common sense and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.“ On camera and on Truth Social all week, Trump governed with his usual confidence and bravado. But behind the scenes, there was evidence of frustration and breakdowns in communication in an administration that has moved with lightning speed to try to shake up the government. “

In his second week in office, President Trump has shown resolute leadership in the face of tragedy and robustly pushed through on enacting the agenda that the American people gave him a historic mandate to implement—and Americans can count on President Trump to continue delivering,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai… 🟪 (LINK TO FULL STORY)

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